Start with what works: a field guide
Operations · D. Scot Nattrass · 6 min read
When I walk into a business for the first time, the owner usually wants to show me what's broken. I get it. The broken stuff is loud. It's what kept them up last night, and it's why they called.
But the first thing I want to find is the part that's working. Not to be polite about it. Because it's the most useful information in the building.
Why start there
Every business that's still open is doing something right. Maybe it's the way the front desk handles a rush. Maybe it's one salesperson who closes twice as often as everyone else. Maybe it's a supplier relationship that's held up for fifteen years. Something is keeping the lights on, or they'd already be off.
That working part is proof. It shows what this particular business, with these particular people, can do when things line up. And it's a much better guide than any framework I could bring in from outside.
I learned this the slow way. I spent years inside big companies like Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Delta, and Bristol-Myers Squibb, then five years across the table from more than 400 small business owners in 46 states. The pattern held at every size. The organizations that improved fastest weren't the ones that tore everything down. They were the ones that figured out why their best parts worked, and spread that.
What "working" actually looks like
It's rarely a whole department. It's usually smaller than that, and easy to miss. Here's where I look first:
- A process nobody complains about. If a task gets done on time, every time, and nobody mentions it, that's a system worth studying.
- A person everyone goes to. Every business has someone who "just knows." What they know is usually a process that was never written down.
- A customer who keeps coming back. Ask why. The answer tells you what you're really selling.
- A number that stays steady. Consistent margin on one product line, reliable collections from one type of client. Steady doesn't happen by accident.
- A habit the owner takes for granted. The Monday check-in they've run for years. Reading the bank balance every morning. Owners often have better instincts than systems.
How we document it
Finding it is half the job. The other half is writing down why it works, in plain words, so it can be repeated. Here's the order we follow.
- Talk to the people doing the work. Not just the owner, and not just managers. The person running the task knows things the org chart doesn't.
- Map how it really flows. Who touches it, in what order, what they check, what they skip. How it actually runs, not how it's supposed to.
- Ask why it holds up. This is the step most people skip. Is it the tool? The person? A rule someone set years ago? Usually it's a mix, and you need to know which parts are carrying the weight.
- Write it down as a benchmark. A short description anyone could follow. This becomes the standard the rest of the business gets measured against.
That last step matters more than it sounds. Once you have a written benchmark from your own business, you stop comparing yourself to some ideal company in a book. You're comparing yourself to your own best day.
Then, and only then, the fixes
Once we know what's working and why, the broken parts start to make sense. Very often a weak area is weak because it's missing the one thing that makes the strong area work. The strong team has a checklist and the weak one doesn't. The healthy product line has a clear owner and the struggling one has three.
So the fix isn't to import something foreign. It's to bring the weak part into line with the strong one. Your people already know how to do it, because they already do it somewhere else in the business. That makes change easier to accept, and a lot more likely to stick.
Here's one from early in my traveling consultant years. A heavy equipment repair shop in Williston, North Dakota, had ridden the oil boom from 2010 to 2014 on overflow work from the truck shops around it. They were next door to a Peterbilt shop and across the street from a Kenworth shop. There was so much money coming in that nobody worried much about records.
Then in 2015 oil fell from $100 a barrel to half that, and fracking all but stopped. Where truckers used to wait in line for a repair, now the shop was waiting for trucks, and the trucks had stopped rolling. By the time we were called in, they were close to closing their doors, but nobody wanted to admit it.
It was the middle of winter, with snow piled deep all around. I sat down with Darrell, the owner, then with Leva, his office administrator, and then with his lead mechanic. They did some things very well. They could fix anything. They could walk me through exactly how they ordered parts so they had what they needed, when they needed it, to do the core work. We described those processes together until all of us understood not only what worked, but how and why it worked so well. They knew what to do, and they did what they knew well.
What wasn't working was everything around it. Processes that didn't capture what a business needs to know. Finances that were a disorganized mess, not from incompetence, but from never having learned the business of the business, mostly basic cost accounting. So money went where it shouldn't, and decisions got made without enough good information.
So we started with what they did well and why it worked, and showed them what it would take to run the rest of the business the same way. They had to get good at things that hadn't mattered much when the top line was huge, and mattered enormously once it shrank with the price of oil.
Yes, they were still standing, so some of what they did was right. But when things get tight, the definition of right gets a lot narrower. One week what saved them was a fire truck that pulled in needing about $9,000 in repairs. They paid on the spot with a credit card, and that one job made payroll for the period. That was the part that was working: when someone needed them, they could fix it.
With some education and help from our consultants, they became a different company in about two weeks. Leva and Darrell took command of the numbers. When I visited a year and a half later, they were growing again, in a new and bigger space, faster than I'd believed possible. Darrell had even opened a second business, and it was running well too.
Why this beats the usual approach
Most consulting starts with a template. Here's the ideal structure, here's the software, here's the playbook. Now fit your business into it.
The trouble is that templates don't know your customers, your people, or the reasons you've survived this long. Force a business into someone else's shape and you often break the very things that were holding it up. Then you're worse off, and you paid for the privilege.
Starting with what works protects those things. It also gives your team a reason to believe in the change, because the change is built out of their own best work.
Try it this week
You don't need a consultant to start. Pick one thing in your business that just works, something you never have to think about. Then ask three questions:
- Who makes it work?
- What do they do that other parts of the business don't?
- Is it written down anywhere?
If the answer to the last one is no, write it down. That one page might be the most valuable document you own.
And if you'd like a hand finding the rest, that's exactly how we start every engagement.
Where AI actually earns its keep in a small business
AI · D. Scot Nattrass · 5 min read
Every owner I talk to right now has been told AI will change everything. Most of them have also paid for at least one tool that changed nothing.
Both things are true. AI is genuinely useful in a small business. It's also genuinely easy to waste money on. The difference usually comes down to one question: did you start with a problem, or with a tool?
Here's my honest list, based on what I've seen work and what I've watched quietly get cancelled.
Where it earns its keep
Drafting the first version of anything. Proposals, follow-up emails, job posts, policies, the reply to an unhappy customer. AI is very good at getting you from a blank page to something you can edit. You still do the editing. But the hardest part of writing is starting, and that part just got a lot cheaper.
Reading what nobody has time to read. Contracts, long email threads, supplier terms, a stack of customer reviews. Ask it to summarize, pull out the dates and dollar amounts, or flag anything unusual. It won't replace your lawyer, but it will tell you which page to show your lawyer.
Spotting patterns in your own numbers. Export your sales or expenses and ask what changed month over month, which customers are ordering less, which costs crept up. It's faster than scanning rows by eye, and it tends to catch the slow drift people miss. Always check the math it hands back.
Watching the routine stuff. Sorting the inbox, flagging overdue invoices, reminding someone a license renewal is coming. The boring checks that eat an hour a day and fail the one week someone is out sick.
Taking repeatable tasks off your team. If someone does the same ten clicks every morning, that's a candidate. Copying order details from email into a spreadsheet. Sending the same onboarding packet. This doesn't replace the person. It gives them their morning back.
Where it mostly adds noise and cost
Tools bought before the problem was named. This is the big one. A subscription that was supposed to "transform operations" and now gets opened twice a month. If you can't say in one sentence what the tool fixes, you probably don't need it yet.
Automating a broken process. If the process is a mess by hand, automating it gives you the same mess, faster, with fewer people watching. Fix the process first. Then automate it.
Customer conversations that need a human. A chatbot is fine for "what are your hours." It's a liability with a customer who's upset, confused, or about to spend real money. People can tell, and they remember.
Decisions that need judgment. Hiring, firing, pricing, whether to take on a big client. AI can lay out the options and the numbers. It can't weigh your values, your relationships, or what you know about the person across the table. Those calls stay with you.
Anything you can't check. AI sounds confident even when it's wrong. If you can't verify what it gave you, whether that's a number, a legal point, or a fact about a competitor, don't build on it.
A simple test before you buy anything
Before you sign up for another tool, run it through four questions:
- What exact problem does this solve, and what does that problem cost us now in time or money?
- Who will own it day to day?
- How will we know in 90 days whether it worked?
- What happens if we turn it off?
If you can't answer all four, wait. The tool will still be there next quarter, and probably cheaper.
How we use it
We use AI in our own work the way we'd use any good tool: to see patterns faster, catch things earlier, and take the busywork off the table. Inside a client's business, we only bring it in after we've diagnosed the problem, and we pull it back out if it's adding noise or cost instead of clarity.
The technology should fit into your business. Your business shouldn't contort itself to fit the technology.
If you're not sure a tool is worth it, or you have a few subscriptions you suspect aren't pulling their weight, that's a good conversation for a Clarity Session.
The four numbers every owner should know cold
Finance · D. Scot Nattrass · 7 min read
Ask most owners how the business is doing and you'll hear about sales. Sales matter. But I've sat with plenty of owners whose sales were climbing right up to the week they couldn't make payroll.
Sales tell you how busy you are. These four numbers tell you whether you're okay. The principles that keep a three billion dollar company solvent are the same ones that keep a corner shop alive, and they start here.
The examples below use one made-up business with round numbers, so the math is easy to follow.
1. Gross margin
What it is: what's left from each sale after the direct cost of delivering it. Materials, the labor on that job, shipping, card fees.
How to figure it: sale price minus direct costs, divided by sale price.
Say you sell a job for $10,000 and it costs $6,500 to deliver. That's $3,500 left, a 35% gross margin. That $3,500 is what pays rent, salaries, insurance, and eventually you.
Why it matters: margin is where most businesses leak money quietly. One product line might run at 45% while another runs at 12%, and the busy one isn't always the good one. Know your margin by product or service, not just the overall average. The average hides the problem.
2. True cash
What it is: your bank balance minus what's already spoken for.
How to figure it: take today's balance, then subtract payroll, rent, loan payments, taxes, and bills due in the next 30 days.
If the bank says $120,000 and $55,000 goes out over the next month, your true cash is $65,000. That's the number you can actually make decisions with.
Why it matters: the bank balance lies by leaving things out. Owners who read only the balance tend to feel rich the day after a big deposit and broke the day before payroll. True cash flattens that ride and stops you from spending money that already has a name on it.
3. Runway
What it is: how many months you could keep the doors open if sales stopped tomorrow.
How to figure it: cash on hand divided by your monthly fixed costs. Fixed costs are the bills that show up whether you sell anything or not.
With $120,000 in the bank and $40,000 a month in fixed costs, your runway is 3 months.
Why it matters: sales don't stop often, but they slow down. A key customer leaves, a season is soft, a supplier raises prices. Runway tells you how much time you have to respond. Three months feels like plenty until you're in month two. Knowing the number early means you make calm decisions instead of desperate ones.
4. How long it takes to get paid
This is the one most people forget until it's too late.
What it is: the average number of days between doing the work and having the money in your account.
How to figure it: take what customers owe you right now, divide by your average monthly sales, and multiply by 30.
If you sell $100,000 a month and customers owe you $150,000, you're waiting about 45 days to get paid. Every extra 10 days of waiting ties up roughly $33,000 of your money in other people's pockets.
Why it matters: this is how profitable businesses run out of cash. You pay for materials and people up front, then wait weeks to collect. Growth makes it worse, not better, because every new job means more money out before any comes back in. A business can be winning on paper and still bounce a check.
The fixes are usually simple and a little uncomfortable. Invoice the day the work is done, not at the end of the month. Ask for deposits on big jobs. Follow up on day one past due, not day thirty. Make it easy to pay you.
Put them on one card
You don't need a finance department for this. You need about fifteen minutes a week and the discipline to look.
| Number | How often to check | What it tells you |
|---|
| Gross margin | Monthly, by product or service | Which work actually pays |
| True cash | Weekly | What you can safely spend |
| Runway | Monthly | How much time you have |
| Days to get paid | Monthly | How much of your money others are holding |
Write the four numbers on an index card. Update it on the same day every week or month. After a few rounds you'll start to feel the business differently. The surprises get smaller, and the decisions get easier.
If any of these numbers are hard to pin down in your business, that's usually the first thing worth fixing. It's also a very normal place for us to start.
Focal Dynamic network
Founder · Focal DynamicD. Scot Nattrass
Principal & CEO, fractional COO
We build your solution on what is already working in your business, not against it.
AboutMeet Scot
I started out building trading systems at Goldman Sachs, rolled out systems to 52,000 people at Merrill Lynch, and was one of six on the Delta project team that turned a $4.7M project into $114M of new revenue in its first year, leading the business analysis.
Then I spent five years with more than 400 small and mid-sized business owners in 46 states. The lesson: the principles that keep a three billion dollar company running are the same ones that keep a corner shop alive. Focal Dynamic, and this network, exist to put that to work.
What I offerWays to work with Scot
Consultant
Introduce the systems, processes, controls, and habits your business needs to run well.
Coach
An accountability partner who keeps you on track long after the engagement ends.
Fractional COO / CIO
Take the reins and shepherd the work along until you no longer need me.
Strategic advisor
Help navigate the larger issues every business eventually faces.
Where Scot goes deep
Fractional COO / CIOOperational consultingStrategic planningFinancial clarityChange managementIT & AI integrationExecutive coachingSales & marketing strategy
The approachHow Scot works
Five moves, one principle: understand it before you touch it. Discovery, Design, Development, Deployment, Debugging. We interview your people, map how the work actually flows, write down why the strong parts work, and bring the weak parts into line with them.
Best fitWho Scot works best with
Owners whose business feels harder to run than it should be, from $200K a year to $35M.
Track recordThe work so far
30+Years in operations, IT, and consulting
400+Businesses advised across 46 states
$114MFirst-year revenue from one launch at Delta
$2–3BYearly oncology drug distribution at OTN, a Bristol-Myers Squibb company
Focal Dynamic network
Business Funding & Finance · Fora FinancialJim Magrath
Business funding and finance for small businesses
Business funding and finance, with a range of solutions built for the small business.
AboutMeet Jim
Jim brings decades of operational and strategic experience to SMBs navigating cash flow challenges, growth constraints, and operational complexity. He works with founders and operators to diagnose what's working, fix what isn't, and build sustainable systems that scale.
ExpertiseWhere Jim goes deep
Small business fundingWorking capital managementFinancial strategyBuilding systems for growth
The approachHow Jim works
Jim starts where you are: what's working well in your business? What patterns do you see repeating? From there, he digs into what isn't working, traces it back to root causes, and builds a practical path forward using whatever tools, people, or processes actually fit your business.
Best fitWho Jim works best with
Founders and operators navigating cash flow challenges, growth constraints, and operational complexity.
Focal Dynamic network
AI AssistantsBoardy
AI superconnector
I connect people with the right experience to help them move a goal forward.
Your AI drafts a short intro email to Boardy and shows it to you before anything is sent.
AboutMeet Boardy
I'm Boardy, an AI superconnector. I talk with founders, operators, investors, and executives to understand what they're building, what they need next, and where a useful connection could help.
I focus on specific goals and shared relevance, not just titles. When I spot a promising fit, I ask each person whether they'd like to connect; if both are interested, I make the introduction.
Focal Dynamic network
Sales & Marketing Strategy · FounderScaleRoman Lewcke
Offer testing with real ads for founders
Most offers fail on the message, not traffic. I find the one that works before you scale.
AboutMeet Roman
I spent twelve years building distribution for my own product in Mexico, Latin America and the US, from the first order to retail shelves. With my own money and my own risk, not as a consultant. That taught me the expensive way that most launches fail because nobody tested the offer first.
Today I run small, fast ad tests for founders so they see what buyers respond to before they commit a budget. Through Exportkontor, I also help German manufacturers find and sign distributors in Mexico and the US.
What I offerWays to work with Roman
Microtest Sprint Pack
Five small ad tests on pain points, headlines, lead magnets, creatives and copy. You get the message, audience and offer that people respond to. $800, ad spend separate.
Funnel Build
Offer, landing page and conversion tracking built around the winning message, connected to your own checkout. $800.
Optimization Sprint
One focused campaign round at a time, each one justified by the result of the last. $800 per sprint, no retainer.
Market entry Mexico and USA
Through Exportkontor, two weeks of testing in the target market, then we negotiate in person with the right distributors until the contract is signed.
Where Roman goes deep
Offer testingMeta adsMessage testingLead generationMarket entry MexicoDistributor searchUS market entry
The approachHow Roman works
I start with your customers, not your ads. We pick the pain points and messages to test, then run small Meta ad tests, one variable at a time, about $50 each. You see what people actually click and ask about. Only then do we build a funnel around the winner.
Best fitWho Roman works best with
Founders of B2B and service businesses with a real offer who are not sure yet which message sells it. And manufacturers ready to sell in Mexico or the US.
Track recordThe work so far
12 yrsBuilding distribution in Mexico, LatAm and the US
Since 2009Distributor relationships in Mexico
~$50Ad spend per test
Under 3 wksTo a Mexico distributor at the table for a client
Focal Dynamic network
IT & AI Integration · Bootstrap ConsultingGbolaro V. Oshun
Business Analyst, specializing in AI Governance
Clear requirements are the foundation of successful delivery. I translate business needs into clear solution approaches.
AboutMeet Gbolaro
I help organizations improve their processes and ways of working, using technology where it adds value; not simply for the sake of using technology. Adept at translating business needs into actionable solution approaches, I develop clear, practical solution designs that improve efficiency and deliver measurable business value.
With a specialization in AI Governance, I also provide AI advisory services to help organizations adopt and use AI responsibly. This includes integrating governance considerations into solution design from the outset, conducting AI Impact Assessments to identify and assess potential AI risks, and developing internal AI policies and guidance to support the effective use of AI.
What I offerWays to work with Gbolaro
Monthly Retainer
Continuous support as you navigate transformation or scale AI responsibly (Business Analysis support, AI Governance & Policy).
Project-Based
Focused, scoped engagements for a specific initiative or milestone. Typical projects run 6 to 12 weeks (Business Analysis support, AI Governance & Policy).
Where Gbolaro goes deep
Process ImprovementProcess ModellingRoot Cause AnalysisUser StoriesAI Impact AssessmentInternal AI PolicyRequirements Elicitation
The approachHow Gbolaro works
I start with an Initial Consultation to understand your business, goals, needs, opportunities, and pain points. From there, I document a high-level Needs Assessment to capture what I've learned and establish a shared understanding of what needs to be addressed. Once we agree on the way forward, I move into more in-depth discovery, which may involve reviewing documents, speaking with stakeholders, and running workshops. I then use what I've learned to identify root causes and develop practical solution designs, including the current and future states. Throughout, I keep the improvement effort focused on the overarching business goal and act as the voice of the customer.
Best fitWho Gbolaro works best with
Early to growth-stage teams as well as large enterprises.
Track recordThe work so far
Gbolaro provided Business Analysis support for our AI Therapist Project. Her work delivered clear, ethically aligned requirements that gave the technical team a solid basis for development.
Dr. Seyi Obembe